


Bootylicious

by nicasio_silang



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M, TW: whimsical cannibalism of a secondary character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I hate you because I am having this totally split feeling where on the one hand, oh my God, Danny, Jeremy is <i>dead</i>, and on the other hand you just said steaks and I felt so hungry about it that I think I had a tiny orgasm.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bootylicious

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to my Twitter feed for their encyclopedic knowledge of references to cannibalism in pop culture.

The sun comes up. Hard spears of light through the cracks in the fuselage that reveal, one by one, the places where the wind stabbed through in the night. As each one shows itself they stuff it with seat cushions, with flotation devices, shutting themselves in darker and darker, sweating and breathing as much warmth into the space as any living body can willingly generate. In the far corner: the dead body. 

Soon it’ll be time to take the body outside. When the sun is higher, or when the smell becomes too much.

“Whoa, whoa, _what?_ ” Noise reverberates in the enclosed wreckage. Mindy’s voice is like an abused tin whistle. “Are you fucking kidding me with this?”

Danny catches the coat she rips out of the wall and throws at his head. 

“Seriously?” He says while she shoves chair stuffing in to fill the gap. “We’re gonna lose all our toes and die and you’re worried about an expensive coat?”

“That’s what you think of me?” She takes the coat back. It goes in their bedding/blanket/perpetual nap of survival pile. “Danny, if this was even a thousand dollar coat, I would still tear it up and use it to bandage your gross, blackening toes.”

He grumps over to the food store to dole out their breakfast peanuts and pretzels. 

“So what, sentimental value?”

“Oh, no, I wore this like two times. But it was the opposite of expensive: it was 70% off on ModCloth, and actually in my size. You don’t just turn something like that into insulation.”

“Yeah that makes a lot more sense.”

They settle back into the nest of suitcase contents and airplane lap blankets. The burgundy coat goes over their laps, he spills the pretzels and nuts on it, about a handful and a half. 

“Just saying, the lining on this thing is amazing. If the toe situation gets dire, we’ll revisit it as an option.”

“I’m wearing your sweaters as socks. It’s dire.”

“Ugh, Danny, you can’t lose your toes! What if you couldn’t dance anymore? Without that going for you, you might never again know the touch of a woman.”

“You’re gonna regret saying stuff like that when I’m dead and you have to cannibalize me.”

It’s the fourth day.

“Please, I would never cannibalize you. Look at you, you’d be so gamey.”

 

It’s the ninth day. They’re chewing on pieces of Danny’s leather belt.

“You know there’s no nutritional value in this, right?” She says. “We’re just making pitiful memories for Matt Lauer to wince at.” 

Danny swallows a piece of belt. 

“There was no nutritional value in those little bottles of mouthwash, but they went pretty fast.”

Around a strip of leather, she says, “Those hours of freaky pseudo-drunk were totally worth it, don’t even.”

“Yeah, okay.” 

It feels awfully normal to chew and swallow belt now. They munch in easy silence for a while, bundled and close, spare pant legs wrapped around their hands in lieu of mittens. Something’s dripping outside-- meltwater running into their makeshift tubs. 

“I still can’t believe there were _zero_ narcotics in any of this luggage.”

“Right!” Mindy throws up her hands. “What the hell, people?”

That night the rest of the belt becomes belt soup. It tastes as good as that sounds. 

 

It’s the twelfth day. 

“No way, man, I know how this goes. We’re gonna get back to civilization carrying this dark secret, then one day at a seaside cafe we’ll order the albatross, and five minutes later I’m taking a nose dive off a bridge to my death.”

“That is not gonna happen, that story is based on the guy _not knowing_ that he ate human flesh.”

“Oh my God you need to never say the word ‘flesh’ ever again.”

It’s a discussion that calls for pacing, gesturing, maybe shouting, but there’s no strength to do it with. They’re inside a pile of cheap blankets and varied winter coats. They’re wearing two hats each. Under all of it, they can just barely see the whites of each others’ eyes. 

“Look, I’ll take him outside for a minute and do the...the slicing. You don’t need to see that.”

“What, because of my delicate feminine constitution? Oh, dear me! I hope there are smelling salts somewhere in all this luggage! Because you think I’m gonna faint. Because I’m a girl. I’m a surgeon, okay, I can cut on people.”

“It’s not surgery if he’s already dead, and did I say anything about your...feminine whatever? You and him used to have a thing, I thought maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t want to see him chopped into steaks.”

There’s a silence, the noise of breathing. He reaches out and finds her arm. 

She says, “I hate you because I am having this totally split feeling where on the one hand, oh my God, Danny, Jeremy is _dead_ , and on the other hand you just said steaks and I felt so hungry about it that I think I had a tiny orgasm.”

“That’s disgusting, but he’d probably be happy about it.”

“I don’t know if I can do this. He was our friend. He was annoying, and a slut, but he was our friend.”

In the dark he hears her sniffle, pulls her forward until he can find her forehead with his mouth. 

“Hey. Hey, we’ll wait. They’ll probably find us tomorrow anyway.”

She breathes hard against his chest, sobs once. Coughs.

“We’re the worst smelling people to ever live,” she says.

“Hush.”

 

Danny wakes up to the sight of Mindy fitting broken mini booze bottles between her fingers and wrapping her knuckles with strips of yellow chiffon. He lets her work for a moment.

“You know there aren’t any wolves in the Andes, right?”

“Yeah, I love David Attenborough too, congratulations on watching PBS. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you gonna fight a yeti?”

“Danny, if I murder an alpaca, then we don’t have to eat Jeremy.” Danny sighs.

“Thanks, Min.”

“Go back to sleep.”

He does. They don’t find an alpaca.

 

They’re waiting for the meat to cook. It’s pale, like a pork chop. Danny’s breathing hitches on every intake; Mindy can’t stop blinking. Their faces are strained from the sort of weeping that happens when the body has nothing to spare for tears. Mindy coughs softer than normal: a laugh, these days.

“We’re going to be _the_ pop culture reference for cannibalism from now on, you know. When we get home. Donner, shmonner, it’ll be all Castellano, party of two.”

Danny clenches and unclenches his fists, then again. Rubs his knuckles into his eye sockets before answering.

“Why is my name the cannibal name? What about like...Hannibal Lahiri.”

“Mm, nah, Lahiri sounds too wholesome, never going to catch on.”

The meat cooks. It’s a while before Danny takes it out of the boiling water, using empty pens for chopsticks. It sits between them; their mouths build up more saliva than they’d remembered was possible. Outside, the wind howls. 

“I’m glad you’re here, Mindy,” he says. 

Then he pulls the meat apart and they eat. 

 

“How are we going to explain this to our kids?”

“Our what?”

“Oh come on, not like, _our_ kids, you know what I mean. Just, when are they ever going to be at the right age to sit them down and explain that life is going to be socially weird for you because mommy ate human flesh?”

“Whoa, I thought we weren’t calling it flesh?”

“Yeah, I’m cycling back around. Calling it meat makes me feel weird about it, like we’re opening a cannibal deli.”

“...Soylent Subs?” He looks really proud of himself.

“Deli, man, deli. I don’t want to work on some human flesh assembly line.” By unspoken mutual agreement, they’re eating as little as possible. Between them, they shred a 1 oz. slab into pieces. “God, we are never going to be able to talk to other people.”

“Hey, maybe we’ll die and not have to worry about it.”

“So glad you’re here to help me keep a positive outlook, Danny.”

“Don’t die, Min.”

“Sure, okay, thanks.” 

 

It takes a lot of snow to make a pot of water. Leaned against each other, they watch it melt. When Danny opens his mouth to talk, he can feel the skin of his lips break.

“Silence of the Lamb Chops?”

“That sounds like more of a butcher’s, though, right?”

“Yeah, it’s a stretch.” 

“Hey, you know how your between-beard made you super unattractive?”

“No.”

“I shielded you from that knowledge to protect you. It was gross, though. But this full beard thing is working.”

“Oh yeah? Doin’ it for you?”

“Big time.”

“You sure this isn’t a Stockholm Syndrome thing?”

“I’m not your prisoner, hello.”

“I smell like the inside of a cow.”

She sniffs at the side of his neck. The smell of a living person: the only good thing here. 

“More like the outside of a cow.”

When the water’s done they drink it slowly, one taste on the tongue at a time.

 

“Could you squash ‘people’ and ‘eatery’ into one word?”

“Like...a Peopery?”

It’s deep dark outside, it has been for a while. More and more, the idea of a larger world seems ludicrous. That other people, living people, would walk on sidewalks, watch televisions, wear swimsuits, and get haircuts while all the while the two of them huddle here, wasting and wasting. It isn’t possible.

“That’s awful. Nobody is going to come to our deli.”

“Pretty sure that was already a given.” 

 

“Hey, stop, stop, I can’t do this.”

“Okay, okay. Is it...is it because we work together?” He tries on a smile. “Because I don’t think that’s really...”

“No,” she takes his face in her hands. His soft face now gone sharp, skull in relief. “No, no, no. You taste like Jeremy’s butt cheek right now.”

 

“Danny. Danny. Danny! We could just name it after Jeremy!”

“...becoming a cannibal made you really dark.”

“Yeah there’s a real shocker.”

 

The dust and weather has gotten so matted into her hair that it barely shudders in the gale of the helicopter’s blades. The _chuka-chuka_ noise of a man-made thing is beautiful, buffeting. There’s a stretcher under her back, there are people around her who aren’t Danny, who have utterly different faces and voices. They’re wearing day-glo orange, a bold choice. Mindy feels things happen to her body through a daze of knowing they’re not real. No-one is coming for them. This is some shady hallucination, a dirty trick. Any moment it’ll fade and the world will again be just her, Danny, and the body, all of them being chipped away by the wind. 

“Oh my God.” She tears the oxygen mask off her face. “Oh my _God_.”

“What?” Danny, shabby and small, reaches for her.

“Dude! _The Long Pig_.”

“Oh my God.”

“Right?”

“How did we not think of that before?”

“Because, it’s one of those, it’d be like one of the swanky places in the Village, right?”

“Yeah, little bastards would love it.”

They laugh until they pass out.

**Author's Note:**

> Like you, I have no idea where the other passengers are, or the pilot, or where they were flying to or why. The only research involved in the writing of this story was a Google search to ensure I used the word "fuselage" correctly.


End file.
